Attendance tracking is critical for businesses for numerous reasons. However, employees typically believe that diligent attendance monitoring is to browbeat them. Thus, for flawless attendance management, employers need to assure their employees that it is for the betterment of both the company and the employees. Today, there are numerous attendance tracking software tools available in the market that can help businesses automate and control attendance management operations, better support the employees, make employees realize the positive side of attendance tracking, enhance employee productivity & satisfaction, and boost business performance.
The News:
- The global time and attendance software market size is projected to reach USD 5,312 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 9.4% from 2021 to 2030.
- Occupations with high remote work availability experience lower rates of employee absence.
- When offered continued remote working status with a pay cut, 61% of respondents accepted a pay cut to work remotely full-time.
- Businesses with integrated timekeeping and payroll exceeded their revenue targets by 7%.
- Leveraging a software solution that incorporates timekeeping and payroll capabilities helps increase the chances of not having a payroll error rate by 44%.
- Studies indicate that daily time tracking helps close about 80% of productivity leaks; still, only about 19% of employers track the time of salaried workers.
- Multi-tasking without time-tracking decreases productivity to 45%.
- US economy loses 50 million hours of productivity every day due to unrecorded work activities.
- Time theft affects 75% of businesses; it can take almost 7% of their gross annual payroll.
- The total cost of minimum wage and overtime violations that the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has recovered in the last 5 years is over USD 1.4 billion.
- By automating time tracking, companies can eliminate daily lost productivity and recapture around USD 666,400 in yearly wages.
How did we get here?
#1. Top Attendance Tracking Challenges Faced by Employers
Tracking attendance is an essential yet complex business function. As a long-term impact of the pandemic, employees now prefer working remotely, value work-life balance more than ever, and prefer working with companies that are open to the idea of a hybrid working model. These new working models have numerous benefits for the employers too but require flawless modern attendance tracking systems to accommodate employees working in flexible work schedules and from different locations. Here are the top attendance tracking challenges faced by employers.
- Employers need to maintain voluminous/comprehensive records for employees’ work hours, leaves, uninformed absences, vacations, and more.
- Manual attendance tracking suffers from human errors and data management issues like access, update, storage, etc.
- Rampant absenteeism affects overall work planning, productivity, and performance for business.
- Challenges in attendance management directly impact work scheduling and timely payroll processing.
- Monitoring and controlling employees’ work hours, availability, and leaves/absenteeism consumes enormous resources for the company.
- Improper attendance tracking systems give undue advantage to unruly employees, demotivating sincere employees.
- Allowing flexible working (where the employees can choose to work in their most productive hours across the day) enhances employees’ work-life balance and work satisfaction; however, its implementation is challenging due to attendance management complexities.
- Remote working and hybrid working models have numerous benefits for employers and employees. Still, businesses struggle to adopt these working models as conventional attendance tracking techniques do not work with these models.
- Regulatory norms mandate maintaining appropriate attendance records, for which the attendance data must be easily accessible, in the right format, and securely stored to ensure flawless compliance management.
- Most employees typically believe that attendance tracking is to browbeat or intimidate them and do not cooperate; employers struggle to convince them about the need and importance of flawless attendance tracking for the company.
#2. Top Reasons Why Attendance Tracking Is Important for Your Business
While employees commonly believe that attendance tracking is a way to intimidate and control them, it is unavoidable for employers. Besides, it has numerous advantages for both the employees and the employers. Here is why attendance tracking is vital for every business.
Planning and Scheduling
Whether the team is small or large, it is essential to keep track of employee availability to plan and schedule work and projects. In the absence of diligent attendance management, there can be a sudden staff shortage during deadlines and emergencies. Similarly, at other times, there can be more staff available for smaller tasks and those without a stricter deadline. Such imbalances can cost businesses heavily.
Monitoring employee attendance helps in better work scheduling and distribution. Further, routine monitoring of employees’ work hours helps watch and control any lags or time theft at the right time, preventing losses and maintaining consistent productivity. It also helps managers ensure that multiple employees do not take time-offs at the same time. It also helps managers inform the relevant employees when their presence is absolutely necessary and when an informed absence is affordable based on the deadlines. Overall, better planning and scheduling through proper attendance management enables companies ample scope for allowing time-offs, leaves, and vacations to their employees, creating a balance where all employees get equal opportunities for a break from work. It also helps managers to promptly approve employee time-off requests if attendance data is well-recorded and accessible.
Boost in Employee Morale
Employees typically need to balance the work of other unavailable/absent employees. When attendance is not tracked routinely and properly, absenteeism increases, putting added work burden on other employees; moreover, it gets unnoticed by managers, demotivating the sincere employees.
Attendance tracking helps managers identify chronically absent employees and demarcate others who work extra to balance their absence. This enables the managers to recognize, reward, and motivate dedicated employees so that they do not regret the extra efforts they are putting in for the company. It helps reduce absenteeism; for example, business process outsourcing (BPO) businesses suffer huge losses due to absenteeism, so they commonly offer special incentives to employees who rarely use their paid leaves, which is possible only with diligent attendance tracking.
Valuable Data for Better Insights and Decisions
Diligent attendance tracking and management help businesses generate valuable data, enabling them to assess work hours spent on projects. Besides, software-based attendance tracking ensures enhanced data accuracy and detailed analytics to compute precise cost estimates, for example, evaluating labor costs for a project or how much a particular employee costs the company based on his average hourly productivity and compensation. Moreover, this data also helps businesses better assess future staffing requirements without investing much time and effort.
Businesses also leverage data generated from attendance monitoring to understand employee issues like burnout, health constraints, or personal issues that impact their availability and productivity and solve such employee issues to enhance overall performance. For example, top companies believe that employees must take a planned vacation routinely to prevent burnout. Using attendance data, they can better track and inform the relevant employees if they have not used their leaves and encourage them to take a well-planned break from work.
Supports Remote and Hybrid Working
Businesses have slowly recognized the benefits of remote working. Today, hybrid working models are also being embraced worldwide. However, remote and hybrid working get extremely challenging for businesses to implement if they do not have a perfect and flexible attendance tracking system in place.
Software-based attendance tracking enables businesses a smooth shift to remote and hybrid working as it allows monitoring in-house and remote employees with equal ease. It allows companies to offer flexible work schedules, better manage remote teams, and scale without hassles. Providing such flexibility helps enhance employees’ work-life balance, satisfaction, and performance.
Compliance Management
Maintaining attendance data is a mandatory requirement for compliance/regulations management. Attendance tracking software tools help provide instant access to employee work hours and attendance data for compliance management and various other purposes.
Enhanced Work Culture
Attendance tracking and management enable employees to monitor their own productivity and take appropriate measures to maintain or improve it as required. It thus helps create accountability, self-discipline, and professional culture at work. It encourages employees to come, leave the office, and take breaks at the proper time as per the policy. It also helps managers ensure that the employees are available when needed, particularly for big firms where it is difficult to track so many employees.
Payroll Management
Payroll management is crucial for any business; however, it cannot be accurately accomplished without attendance tracking. Attendance tracking ensures data-backed, error-free, and speedy payroll processing. Modern attendance tracking systems typically provide payroll integration for enhanced payroll management.
#3. What Are the Key Features of an Attendance Tracking Software?
Every business has different operational needs in attendance tracking. Thus, selecting the right attendance tracking software that offers the appropriate combination of tools to satisfy your business needs and enables easy adoption of new working models is essential. Here are the key features you must look for while choosing a reliable attendance tracking system for your business.
Clock-In, Clock-Out, Breaks
Attendance management systems must include basic clock-in, clock-out, and breaks features to record and display employees’ login, logout, total work hours, number & duration of breaks taken during the workday, etc.
Leave and Absence Management
Companies need to diligently record employees’ presence, informed leaves, and uninformed absence data. Moreover, the data should be promptly accessible to the managers for work planning and scheduling. Leave-and-absence management is thus a must-have feature in the attendance tracking system.
Shift Management
Many companies require employees to work in variable shifts to ensure uninterrupted operations (24*7) throughout the day. Managers need to deploy and optimize staff to ensure smooth operations in these shifts. The shift management feature in attendance tracking software helps managers automate shift management operations. It also sends alerts/notifications and reminders to the relevant employees for any changes in their shift schedules.
Employee Self-Service Portal
Employees routinely need to check their work hours, attendance, leave balance, and more. They typically send these queries to the human resources department. Thus, to reduce the burden of employee queries on the HR department and serve the employees better, attendance tracking systems must include an employee self-service portal where the employees can check all this information independently and conveniently.
Regulatory/Compliance Management
Tracking employees’ attendance is also mandatory for businesses to satisfy the regulatory requirements. Moreover, compliance management is complex and requires maintaining voluminous data accurately. Thus, companies need to invest significant resources, including time and human resources, to ensure diligent compliance management. Attendance tracking software offers all the necessary tools to fulfill comprehensive compliance management needs for businesses under one roof.
Payroll Integration
Attendance data is crucial for payroll processing, but manual data management is prone to human errors. However, such errors are not affordable in payroll management as it directly affects employee remuneration. Thus, attendance tracking systems typically offer payroll integration to streamline payroll management.
Analytics and Reporting
Attendance data is a precious asset for businesses. Advanced attendance tracking systems enable detailed and customized analytics and reporting features. Companies can leverage it to gather insights for better planning, scheduling, hiring, performance management, and informed decision-making.
Calendar Integration
The calendar integration feature in attendance management systems enables businesses to issue alerts, notifications, and reminders to managers and respective employees about employees’ working hours, lag in work hours, assigned shifts, leave applications, absence, and more. It helps managers keep track of their teams. It also notifies the employees so that they can prevent missouts and correct their attendance deficiencies.
Biometrics or Swipe Card System Integration for In-House Employees
Attendance tracking systems offer biometrics or swipe card system integration to automatically record the attendance of employees working from the office premises.
Geofencing for Hybrid and Remote Working
The geofencing tool enables real-time tracking of employees and their attendance by recording their exact location and considering their presence within the approved area equivalent to their presence on the office premises. It automatically records attendance till the employee is within the pre-defined area. This feature supports better control over attendance tracking in remote and hybrid working.
What’s Next?
Attendance tracking is complex yet essential for businesses. It involves recording employees’ working hours, productive hours, leaves, absence, and much more. This information enables businesses to assess staff availability, measure staff productivity, schedule employees, and estimate staff requirements for work. It also acts as a performance indicator.
Businesses are adopting attendance tracking tools to streamline and control attendance management operations, achieve quicker payroll processing, enhance compliance management, boost employee morale, improve work culture, and generate business intelligence insights for better decision-making.
Manual attendance tracking methods are not capable of accommodating remote and hybrid working. Thus, businesses must adopt reliable attendance tracking software tools to embrace the trending working models, ensure seamless business operations, enhance employee satisfaction, boost profits, and stay ahead of the competition.
